Nigel

Greetings my Lords, For some time I have been thinking about a new idea for a multiplayer contest. It is inspired by the Siege That competitions of Stronghold 1, that are held at Stronghold Heaven. To summarize what a Siege That is: one player designs a castle in the map editor, including troops and all that is needed for a scenario, and uploads it. He then challenges other players to siege that castle. Other players can download the map and see if they can beat it with the troops/gold, that has been provided for the attacking army. With Crusader 2 now it is possible to do a Multiplayer Siege That game and the battle in multiplayer should be much more interesting and fun than in singleplayer. With the help of Lord Vetka and other members from Stronghold Nation we are now going to try out a little contest with this and are looking for interested player. This is how it works: A castle has been build on a map with the map editor (including defending troops). I play the defending lord and try to hold it against the challenger. The map also contains a "camp" for the attacker, which includes barracks, mercenary tent, stables and everything he needs to build an army. He is given a certain amount of gold and can choose himself, which troops to buy. We meet online to see if he can capture the castle with the troops he has chosen. There will only be the starting troops for the attacker and the defender. It is a purely tactical game - no economy to take care of. Any economy buildings on the map are just for decoration (or "natural obstacles" to provide cover from archers). Each player has 3 attempts to assault the castle. 1. On the first assault he only knows the castle from a screenshot that is posted plus some additional information that is given in text form (by his spies). He gets the map when we meet online and that is the first time he can see it all. 2. If he does not succeed, he can try again one week later. Now he has the full map available and can study it and design a new strategy. 3. If he still does not succeed, he will be given a larger amount of money to build a stronger army for his third assault. The game will run over a series of 3 different castles (once I have been beaten, Lord Vetka will rebuild the castle bigger and stronger xD ). Thus, there will be 3 different SHC2 maps with castles getting bigger and more difficult. If you join in and take command of the assault force, you will be given some weapons and a good amount of gold. But you don't have to use all the gold you get. What you don't use to recruit your army will be be yours and is added to your personal treasury. You will also get some additional gold (as reward from King Richard): - if you take the castle at the 1st assault, you get 1000 gold pieces. - if you take the castle at the 2nd assault, you still get 500 gold pieces - of course you will get no extra gold if you need a 3rd attempt.. You will collect your gold after a successful assault and you will take this gold along with you from one castle to the next. The player with the most gold from all 3 castles will be the Greatest Conqueror. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The game is looking for players now. To sign up you can either post here, or send me a PM or contact me on Steam (feel free to send me a friends request). Since I have to do all the defending and I am not sure how many players I can handle, there is a maximum number of 10 players. You can sign up while the battle for level 1 is still ongoing but when we move to level 2, the sign up time will be closed. List of Players Lord Chris EaglePrince Blobka LordPaultheDubious Fail Session .....................................Level 1........................Level 2......................Level 3......................TOTAL Lord Chris.................500 gold [2/3].........1001 gold [1/3]............1001 gold [1/3]..................2502 gold EaglePrince................522 gold [2/3]........1033 gold [1/3]............1056 gold [1/3]..................2611 gold Blobka.....................1000 gold [1/3]........4880 gold [1/3].............9000 gold [1/3]................14880 gold LordPaultheDubious....644 gold [2/3].........1740 gold [1/3]............1930 gold [1/3]..................4314 gold Fail Session...............530 gold [2/3].........3647 gold [1/3]..........11020 gold [1/3].................15197 gold

Well, nothing would stop them from doing this.But then, but why should they? They would only be giving an advantage to their competitors. So I don't think it is going to be a real problem. Of course, if they want to give the map to a friend to practice with before they do their second attempt, that is fair enough and in the spirit of the game. For their second attempt, the players may use every means they can to plan and prepare for the assault. Only if they fail again in spite of all these efforts, they can get more money for the third attempt. I can see the amount of gold the players have at any time during the game in the Greatest Lord screen. So I can just take a screenshot when they are done recruiting and starting the attack. That gives me a record of how much money they have kept back for their own treasury. I must say, I am really excited now to see what different tactics the players will come up with to assault the castle :)

"Very good. Let us camp here overnight. It seems the mule has used up all the steps he had for this day, anyway. Also, there are three of us now. If we divide the watch between us, everyone should get a few good hours of sleep before we speak to his Lordship tomorrow."

"... so it would seem". Sir Charles turns his head towards the tall crusader. "Allow me", he stretches out his hand. "Sir Charles Loring. I am heading towards the castle yonder, offering my services in search for employment. Shall we travel together?"

The map is actually quite fun - and not too easy either I am on my second attempt and just failed by an inch - or rather by 10 sacks of flour.... sooo close :')

This sound like a nice map to play for one evening after a hard day's work. Is it uploaded yet? Probably Chris just has too much to do on his hands... ;) EDIT: actually, it is uploaded now and can be found in the Downloads section. Good going, Chris :D

Yes, the Carmina Burana is great. An old piece of music actually, that was used here. You should be careful, though, EaglePrince, about using music other than that from the game to underline your videos. Leagally speaking, you might have to pay some money to the author of the music and some countries are strictly enforcing their copyright laws. That said, I am really looking forward to another video from you. If you can commentate it, it will be even better. I am also looking for some good game recording program. They have mentioned ShadowPlay at the FF twitter site. It seems to be a free program for people with a Radeon Geforce graphics card (which is the one I happen to have). Does anyone have any experience with that program?

It was a surprise indeed. :D We played the map with me as attacker - when I had not looked at the map before and I saw it for the first time in game. I was badly beaten on my first try and inintially thought it was way too hard. But for my second try I changed my strategy and seem to have found the right one. I took the castle and even had a few goldpieces to spare. We will do a few more adjustments and tests this week, but if all goes well, we could be announcing the start of this game during next week. :)

Well, the second sons of the family are traditionally named after an old Saxon anchestor, Karl, who came to England as one of the body guards of Vortingern - or so the family legend has it. But over time, after the Norman invasion and a period when speaking French was considered fashinable, the name changed to Charles. ;) In any case, I wonder if we really need a hard due date for signing up additional characters. Maybe we can play and if someone posts here and wants to join in mid-game, we can invent a story line which allows that. But that is up to the Game Master to decide, of course.

Well, we tested on Friday, but had a bit of a hard time with it. Fortuna, it seems, was in a bad mood and did not smile upon us. First, Real Life interfered, as Real Life sometimes does, and we got started later than planned and then I had to log off and run for my other activities after only 1 hour. Still, there was some time to do testing. We tried one version of the map, that did not function correctly and decided to go back to an earlier version. Unfortunately, I had done some cleaning of my hard drive (yes, I know, I should never do such a thing :P ). By the time I had found the correct file, another 30 minutes had passed. Eventually we got into the game, but I made a mess of the game set-up and Lord Vetka ended up on the spectator's seat watching me attack the AI controlled castle. :S Well, I guess it is all part of the learning curve and at least now I know which mistakes to avoid. We still had a good chat about our different experiences with the map. We have now played several battles against the AI and we both lost some and won some - so that is a good sign suggesting that we cannot be too far off. Also, we could win against the AI while saving quite a lot of the gold that we started with. That is how it should be, too. Playing against a human defender should be more challanging and with that extra gold available, it could be just right. We will do some more PvP testing next week, but even if our test last Friday did not quite go as we hoped, I feel this is moving in the right direction.

This is interesting. I must try out some night battles now. Curious to see what that is like :cool:

Yes, this map looks good and we shall continue with it and build it up to be our level 1 castle. My plan is to run the whole contest over the 3 castles - so the winner is, whoever collects most gold at the very end. That said, we can have a little celebration at the end of each level and say: "Lord A gets the intermediate victory and is the leading man now". This way the other lords know how much of an effort they have to make to catch up and race him to the end. xD The spectator seat was more something I wanted to try out conceptually. We can use it if we think that we want a referee (or a camera man) in this or some other competition that we may want to do in the future. If we use the co-op function, we may even be able to place 2 or 4 player onto the one spectator seat that we have. But I think we should ask the players if they are ok to accept a spectator. Not everyone likes to be watched over the shoulder while he desperately tries to get over the walls of some castle. :D

These role playing games can be quite fun indeed. I remember taking part in one or two before and I shall also join this one. At first I was thinking of using my own online name, Nigel, to play it, but it seems that others are inventing new characters with new names. So I will follow along with that. Also, Sir Nigel is currently on crusade, stuck somewhere in the desert and trying to get a castle ready to fend off some attackers, which will surely come soon ;) So I am introducing (and inventing) my younger brother, Sir Charles Loring. He will join the noble Duke Christopher in this adventure and hopefully return alive and in good health.

Character Name: Sir Charles Loring Character Age: mid 30s Personality: upright, brave, patient, calm, modest, somewhat introvert Titles: none Possessions: sword, shield, bow and arrows, a horse (Hazel), fine but simple clothing, a little gold Talents & Skills: Sword fighting, horse riding, reading and writing (English and Latin), archery Physical Description: A young knight of lowest rank, dressed in the Saxon fashion. During battle, a well fashioned coat of chain mail (he is too poor to afford plate armor) and high quality helmet protect his body. Brief History: Being the second son of an impovershed noble family, he was faced with the choice of becoming a man of the church or finding a living in the service of another Lord. He chose the latter and has been offering the help of his sword and bow to several men of high nobility in exchange for bread, a bed and a chance to gain honour. His older brother, Sir Nigel Loring, is the Lord of Twynham Castle. But although the two brothers are on good terms, they have not met or spoken for some time now.

This was a very nice video, EaglePrince. Very entertaining to watch. You seem to have a good eye for camera angles. As you said you did not have voice comments, I watched it with the sound off and listening to Vangelis "Conquest of Paradise" in the background. That gave a great atmosphere. :lol: Don't worry about the fact that your first attack on the Rat was beaten back. It just makes the video more dramatic. I look forward to seeing more. The only thing I can think of in terms of advice: you may want to figure out how to crop the videos. In the later missions the battles may get very long and have tedious sections. I think 30 - 40 minutes is about the longest for a You-Tube film. Longer that that and people won't watch it any more. But I think you should be able to do that nicely. :D

The competition is over and the winners have been announced here: http://www.strongholdcrusader2.com/?p=1512 The winner was Kyle-kr and the Runner up was Stavross. Congratulations !! Micha! and his map Ocean Bay also recieved an honourable mention, along with a few others - which is very cool :cool: And so did BlackBeard, aka Denroth, who was the first player to post a SHC2 map here at the SHN (and I think also the very first player to ever publicly post a SHC2 map in the time before the Workshop went online). Edit: I happened to speak to Stavross on Steam today. He is very happy about his 2nd place and highly enthusiastic about the game. Even had made a small video about the map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT3qoov2G8U

I also like your idea for the win condition, Lord Vetka. This way, we could be a bit more generous on the gold and still each player would be trying to use only as much as he thinks necessary. I would still like to give an incentive for trying to capture the castle at the first attempt. Perhaps we could say that the King will give a reward of 500 gold pieces for that - in addition to the gold that the attacker managed to save. Then, if you do need a seocnd attempt, you only get the gold you saved. I will try a few more things with the map today and tomorrow and will then send it to you, Lord Vetka. Perhaps we will be able to do another test later this week (Wed. or Fr. would be good for me) and decide if we want to go on with this little test map or just say we used it to prove the concept and take what we learned to start on the real one. If things go well and we don't encounter any unexpected glitches, we may be able to sound the call to arms sometime in February to get this contest started.

Wellcome Aleks, good to see you here. Although I have to admit that I dont remember your name, your avatar struck out to me and rang a bell from the Stronghold Knights. I hope you will like it here. The spirit of the men of Listibaldia (as the SH Knights also called themselves) lives on at this place and we have many good things and activities going on. :D

The Workshop has been up for some time now and it seems to be doing well. Many maps are beeing uploaded and there is quite some activity. As one could expect, there are a lot of maps which are, lets say, simple, cheap and cheerful ;) But there are also quite a few very good, artistically beautiful and high quality maps to be found. I wonder if we want to establish something like a "SHN nomination for a Map of the Month", to honour the very good mapmakers. We could all suggest maps for a list of candidates (I could already name a handful) and once a month we have a vote. The author could then be contacted saying something like "Congratulations, your map has been chosen to be featured by SHN this month, would you agree if we upload it at our site?" Candidates stay on the list to get a chance to be nominated at a later occasion. It is just a thought, but it could be a nice thing for both the mapmaker community and our SHN site.

Well, Lord Vetka and I played another test game yesterday, wich answered this question. I had fitted him out with a large amount of all weapon types, so that he did not need to buy any and could just recruit. This made it very easy for the attacker to go for a knight spam and just walk into the small castle with a wall of steel, regardless of any walls or gates in the way. I think the way to go is to fit out the attacker with a certain number of weapons (given to him in the "baggage train" of his army). The attacker can use all of them or as many as he wants but if he wants more of a certain type, he has to buy them or hire mercenaries. In the end, this is not too different from Matthew's suggesion in option 2. Good thinking, Matthew :)

This is coming along nicely. We now have a small castle, which to me feels about right for a level 1. I won't spoil your surprises, by telling more details, though :P One thing occurred to me while testing. Lord Vetka placed a stash with some weapons and we have the option to give as many weapons for free as we like. This brings the question of how do we want to deal with weapons for a crusader army? If we let the player buy all the weapons, an arabic army will probably be stronger than a crusader army (for the same gold). If we give the player all weapons for free, i.e. only recruiting costs for the soldiers, then the crusader army seems to be more effective. So what do we want to do? Go one way or another? Or does it really matter? Perhaps I am making too much of it. I don't really have a clear idea of what I want to do with this right now, but I am happy to hear peoples thoughts and opinions.

Hey, I just saw a video on youtube where Micha! is playing Sergiu HD on the Pigs Castle. It is also a promotional give away for Stronghold Kingdoms - that is a nice idea. Cool stuff, Micha! :cool:

Lord Vetka and I tried out the maps today and got the skirmish map to work in MP. Giving gold to the attacker has to be done using a resource cache but that does not seem to be a problem. After our test game, I was able to add a cache with 10,000 gold for the attacker and when I tried again in SP, I had that gold in my treasury a few seconds after the game started. A few things still need to be ironed out - for example, is it fast enough to recruit a whole army that way? It would not be quite right if it took 20 minutes to build up the army and then 15 minutes to do the batte. Also, I am now thinking: what would be a good starting castle. How small at the beginning, how big in the end? But it does work in principle, and this has made me very happy today :)

I too also tend to accept anyone who invites me. Like it has been said, there is really not much harm that any one could do (they don't even get your email address) and it is very difficult talk to anyone on steam unless they are on your friends list (or your on thiers). So if they send me an invite, I assume they have to say something to me. This means I have quite a few people on my friends list, which I don't even know. This is no problem other than the fact that the number of friend you can have on Steam is limited - but I am still far away from this limit. I also go through my list from time to time and remove anyone I cannot remember having ever spoken to or who has the "last online: several month ago" tag. Hope this is helpful for you to find your way around on Steam. I am still learning myself - but as far as I can see, it does not seem to be a particular dangerous place. Not much you can do wrong as long as you don't hit the "purchase" button. But even then you would be asked for a confirmation before any transaction becomes valid.

I am glad you guys are having this conversation on the forum rather than in PM. I am learning a lot - was not aware of how the camara grid worked. Also, the discussion of targeting invasions is very helpful. On top of that, Matthew, I like the story you have for this map. You write great stories. You could consider taking your stories further and across several maps. I would love to find out what that message was about once I get to the castle. :)